Find out how your current website is performing before investing further online

Recently a vet said to me:"I'm not sure I want to invest in an upgraded website because I don’t know what my current site is doing. In fact, I’ve never invested in my website because I don’t know where to start and have no idea what to do."

If you’re in this boat or thinking of investing more in online (Google AdWords, new website, Sensis, Facebook), it pays to find out how you’re currently performing. This is a process we do at Pet Pack for many clinics.

One of the main reasons why people don’t invest in online is because they’re not sure what’s happening now, and by association, don’t know if spending more will make any difference.

This is understandable and finding out what the current site is doing makes sense.

While we know that there’s a great opportunity for most vets in Australia and New Zealand to improve their online performance by investing in the right products and services this often won’t happen if the clinic manager doesn’t have a way to measure improvement.

Going back a step, most vets have websites that are underinvested and perform poorly. Their concern is what the site looks like and not about performance (performance means “does it generate business for the clinic and at what price?”).

Poor performance falls into 2 main categories:

A low cost website that generates low levels of business

A high cost web presence that generates higher levels of business at an exorbitant cost

In the case of the vet I was talking too, we set up a process to measure how the current site was performing. This involves analysing how easily the site is found by prospective pet owners, what percentage of visitors to the site call the clinic, how many calls the clinic receives from online and how much does it cost to generate calls.

The analysis included the performance of web, Google My Business, AdWords and Facebook.

Once we had the results, the vet was able to assess the performance of the clinic online objectively. Out of it came a series of recommendations of what can be improved - this can be then taken by the vet to implement themselves, with their current web developer or with Pet Pack.

Called Online Performance Assessment, it gives the clinic the insight they never had and the power to make informed decisions.

It helps with the next steps - supposing the clinic then goes ahead and invests in a series of the recommendations that come out of the report. Assuming they continue to measure the outputs (calls generated), they can easily and quickly assess whether the investment is worth it or not. It becomes clear very quickly when it’s working.

Part of the Online Performance Assessment's value is the recommendations. The experience of the Pet Pack team and Pet Pack clients goes into these - so vets get the benefit of 15 years of online marketing experience.